Home > Author > Mahatma Gandhi
81 " As human beings, our greatness lies not so much in being able to remake the world - that is the myth of the atomic age - as in being able to remake ourselves. "
― Mahatma Gandhi
82 " The future depends on what you do today. "
83 " The future depends on what we do in the present. "
84 " To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest. "
85 " The inner voice is something which cannot be described in words. But sometimes we have a positive feeling that something in us prompts us to do a certain thing. The time when I learnt to recognise this voice was, I may say, the time when I started praying regularly. "
86 " You don't know who is important to you until you actually lose them. "
87 " Stoning prophets and erecting churches to their memory afterwards has been the way of the world through the ages. Today we worship Christ, but the Christ in the flesh we crucified. "
88 " Jesus lived and died in vain if He did not teach us to regulate the whole of life by the eternal law of love. Gandhi, quoted in Merton, p. 38 "
― Mahatma Gandhi , Gandhi on Non-Violence
89 " The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer. "
90 " Ask the poor. They'll tell you who the christians are. "
91 " Seek not greater wealth, but simpler pleasure; not higher fortune, but deeper felicity. "
92 " If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide. "
93 " I realized that it was not as easy to commit suicide as to contemplate it. And since then, whenever I have heard of someone threatening to commit suicide, it has had little or no effect on me. "
― Mahatma Gandhi , Gandhi: An Autobiography
94 " I realized that in refusing to take a vow man was drawn into temptation, and that to be bound by a vow was like a passage from libertinism to a real monogamous marriage. 'I believe in effort, I do not want to bind myself with vows' is the mentality of weakness and betrays a subtle desire for the thing to be avoided. Or where can be the difficulty in making a final decision? I vow to flee from the serpent which I know will bite me, I do not simply make an effort to flee from him. I know that mere effort may mean certain death. Mere effort means ignorance of the certain fact that the serpent is bound to kill me. The fact, therefore, that I could rest content with an effort only means that I have not yet clearly realized the necessity of definite action. 'But supposing my views are changed in the future, how can I bind myself by a vow?' Such a doubt often deters us. But that doubt also betrays a lack of clear perception that a particular thing must be renounced. That is why Nishkulanand has sung: 'Renunciaton without aversion is not lasting.' Where therefore the desire is gone, a vow of renunciation is the natural and inevitable fruit. "
95 " Poverty is the worst form of violence. "
96 " I object to violence because when it appears to do good, the good is only temporary; the evil it does is permanent. "
― Mahatma Gandhi , The Essential Gandhi: An Anthology of His Writings on His Life, Work, and Ideas
97 " In the use of force, one simplifies the situation by assuming that the evil to be overcome is clear-cut, definite, and irreversible. Hence there remains but one thing: to eliminate it. Any dialogue with the sinner, any question of the irreversibility of his act, only means faltering and failure. Failure to eliminate evil is itself a defeat. Anything that even remotely risks such defeat is in itself capitulation to evil. The irreversibility of evil then reaches out to contaminate even the tolerant thought of the hesitant crusader who, momentarily, doubts the total evil of the enemy he is about to eliminate. p. 21 "
98 " Three-fourths of the miseries and misunderstandings in the world will disappear if we step into the shoes of our adversaries and understand their standpoint. "
99 " Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. "
100 " It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result. "